Jeff Beck Finally Hits a Knock-out: Blow by Blow at 50

To be Jeff Beck in 1975 was to understand life has offered the idea of having your cake and eating it too. An unattainable lie, in other terms. Moody, temperamental, unable to slide into one genre and stay there, Jeff Beck was never destined for success in the heavily commercial rock scene of the mid-1970s. You were big or the biggest, you were a star or a superstar, you were a God amongst man or a God amongst Gods. It was seldom about talent, art, or even integrity, it was not about pushing boundaries, expanding your craft, and it certainly wasn’t about making an album that could challenge someone on a large scale. No, rock and roll was about sex, drugs, girls, and money. When you can’t adhere, you quit. Or, of course, you can make an experimental jazz-funk fusion album where you cover The Beatles. There’s always that too. 

In 1975, Jeff Beck freed himself staleness of mainstream rock and roll with one simple action: making art to appeal to him and him alone. Each time Jeff Beck had attempted to make a commercial piece of rock music it failed miserably on the charts or on him. He wasn’t cut out to be the star everyone else gleefully became, he was cut out to be a musician. A true musician - someone whose salvation came from music, whose only true way out of the cycle he was trapped in was to make something so authentically him it changed the way all of guitar music would be performed after. Well, at least one of those things was done with that clear cut intention, but it’s not a doubt that guitar changed after Blow by Blow. It could probably best be described as one of the three best things to happen to electric guitar. Les Paul, Johnny B. Goode, and Blow by Blow - the titans of what happened to guitar music.

To understand Blow by Blow, you have to understand Jeff Beck, it's illusive star of guitar.

It’s an over said cliché - the genius who suffers under the weight of his talent because no one is on his level, but it's incredibly applicable to Beck. Since his early days with The Yardbirds, he proved that he was miles ahead of almost anyone else playing at the time, yet it was never an attention he could deal with. He himself would even commend his abilities

from this time, saying his riff on Train Kept A-Rollin’ was the beginning of punk rock, that his sitar-esque styling on Heart Full of Soul introduced a new layer to a pop song, and he used his very short time with the band to explore the use of feedback, distortion, fuzz work, reverb, and more, making those things more popular within the sphere of popular music and opening those ideas to young players hearing them for the first time. It wasn’t just that he had memorable solos, was a good technical player, or that he was great at arranging, it was his ability to be a triple threat while being a secondary member of a second rate British Invasion band - all while being told he had some big shoes to fill upon the departure of Eric Clapton. To be hailed as damn good was no surprise, but to suddenly be thrust into a spotlight that you clearly never asked for is something else. Beck had issues handling the fame and the workload expected of him, doing two shows a night while also grappling with very present anger issues was never going to be a good mix, and the Yardbirds realized this rather quickly. Just as quickly as he was hired, he was fired. After that shakeup, he was shuffled by manager Mickie Most into releasing teenybopper singles, things he said hung like a toilet seat around his neck for the rest of his career. He formed the criminally underappreciated Jeff Beck Group in 1968 who would become the pioneers of hard rock as we know it. Their debut album Truth set a standard for a rock album could be when the "hard" sound they used was a completely underground concept, discovering Rod Stewart and Ron Wood also didn’t hurt him when it came to making a great album. The idea for the group - a blues-based, gritty rock outfit - was stolen by former-Yardbird bandmate Jimmy Page and reworked into the much more successful and much less innovative Led bloody Zeppelin. The story of this betrayal was detailed in Stephen Davis’ Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, where he wrote:“Jimmy played Led Zeppelin’s demo of You Shook Me for Jeff, which of course was one of Jeff’s showstoppers. According to Beck, Jimmy said ‘Listen to this. Listen to John Bonham.’ When Jeff heard the version his heart sank, ‘I looked him and I said, ‘Jim, what?’ and the tears were coming out in anger.” This, coupled with the fact Stewart and Wood were becoming an in-group, and the fact Beck couldn’t keep a drummer, was a recipe for disaster for the future of the Jeff Beck Group, who were broken up before they were supposed to perform at Woodstock. After that break-up, and a car crash (the first of many), Beck was back on the wagon with another version of the Jeff Beck Group which found it’s footing even less than the last (at the very least the past group had a sort of camaraderie within their playing even with the clashing personalities), and they were broken up quick. Beck than transitioned into a supergroup of sorts with Vanilla Fudge rhythm section Tim Bogart and Carmine Appice, a group that had been looking for life for a while. They recorded a successful album (that Beck actually sang a song on!) and toured Japan before breaking up very bitterly in early 1975, Bogart even going as far to say he would never work with Beck again. After that breakup, Beck would find himself in Munich to try out for the newly available spot as The Rolling Stones lead guitarist, before leaving after only a few songs under the pretense he could never have been in a band so close-knit. It was almost like his final revelation to just be a soloist, that group work had no place in his creative output. 

Beck with The Yardbirds in 1966, with Appice and Bogart in 1973, and the first version of The Jeff Beck Group in 1968

Looking over his career it’s easy to see that he was never a team player. The Yardbirds was him trapped in the world of teenybopper music, punching at the windows of innovation best he could, the Jeff Beck group was a reaction to the bubblegum singles he was forced to record for his contract, and BBA was always going in three different directions. There was a vision but never a full scale execution, always surrounded by people who couldn’t see it or was cut short by the limitations of what he actually shared. He was never easy to work with, almost like the second he was with a group he felt an expectation set upon him that tied his hands even if it was all smoke and mirrors. While making Blow by Blow, he even expressed this idea when talking about collaborating with producer George Martin saying in a 1976 interview for Circus magazine, “[Martin] didn't really dig into the record, you know, or become totally involved, which is probably because I don't think he could [..] I mean, there's probably 25 years between us, how could he know what I was feeling...Inside my gut?” Martin, the genius behind The Beatles output, seemed to intrinsically understand Beck in a way few others could. Even when he disagreed with the direction Beck was going, he still let Beck drive the car. It was a sense of control Beck had with Blow by Blow that isn’t felt in his earlier work. There’s a one person audience he was performing for instead of each and every member of the public. Blow by Blow was created from Beck’s idea he was over, that by thirty he had expended too many chances to find a success that would satisfy the public and (more importantly) himself. In Beck01: Hot Rods & Rock and Roll he wrote: "I was looking up at the wreck of the car that I'd crashed, thinking I was finished. I was working underneath the car and could hardly move. My head was on the ground and water was coming down the driveway. A little transistor radio was playing Miles Davis's Jack Johnson. Lying there, in the water, I realized I wasn't done yet, and this music was going to save me. I went inside and just sat there, sopping wet, listening to the album. I thought I had been resurrected, like a phoenix." 

Starting headway on Blow by Blow was not without its drama - this is Jeff Beck, don't forget. There had been “scraps” of past bands collecting to become his backing band on this album, namely Max Middleton from Jeff Beck Group 2.0 on keyboards and Carmine Appice from BBA on drums. The issue came from Appice, who had apparently fought with Beck on how the album should be credited to both of them, which led to his termination from the project rather unceremoniously and being replaced by Richard Bailey. The band was rounded out by Phil Chen on bass, who would go on to work with Rod Stewart just two years later (and so would Appice for that matter…). For the first time since Rough and Ready about

four years before, Beck wrote a majority of the material with aid from Middleton. All are orignal works, sans three cover songs on the album and an unreleased Stevie Wonder piece in which Wonder plays an uncredited clavinet. Beck has always been a master at song arrangement, it’s what makes his work so impressive past his obvious talent on the guitar. Blow by Blow is a phenomenal example of this, his reinvention of the songs he covers and the space he allows between his guitar and the other instruments. What’s so fascinating about Beck’s work is that even when his work lacks a lyric, it still feels lyrical. One time, speaking of his guitar he said “My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.” Beck’s creative direction was not largely shaded by what others did nor what he was “supposed” to do. While Beck was recording the album, the standard of a great rock guitarist was to be a lengthy soloist whose reputation held more weight than the actual quality of the playing, rock music was a spectacle and the guitarist was the ringleader and subsequent star of the ordeal. Page with his double neck, Hendrix playing his teeth, Townshend smashing his to pieces - it was about what you could show just as much as about what you could do. Beck was never a flashy player, it was about what he could do and that alone. It was a silent form of power that put him above others, his lack of embellishment let his guitar work speak for itself as a powerhouse. Blow by Blow put this at the forefront, his guitar sang each song with ease as he played with an indifferent expression. The album was a culmination of genres that Beck enjoyed, jazz, reggae, blues, electronic, rock, showcasing them through a revolving door of absolutely insane guitar pieces. 

The Jeff Beck Group (2.0) performing Going Down Live on The Beat Club, 1972 (with an amazing Max Middleton lead in)

He opens the album with a few funky strums before devolving it into a nice, jazzy, four-to-the-floor funk beat on You Know What I Mean. Compared to all his work up to this point, this was like throwing everything into a song and seeing what stuck. What’s left on the album is a song that is always loud, moving fast and jerky while never feeling the slightest bit like a note is out of place. It speaks to the talents of Beck and Middleton for writing something so grand and sprawling but never having its showpieces come away larger than the piece at hand. It loudly proclaims the new Jeff Beck sound, and does so in an inarguably abrasive way. He covers an obscure Beatles B-side, She’s a Woman in an homage to working with George Martin but changes the very fabric of the song. The song was originally an unremarkable piece shoved on the flip of I Feel Fine, a typical McCartney vocal with some rather enjoyable backing instruments but Beck changed the arrangement and chord structure. He arranged the song in a more reggaeton structure while making the chords follow a bluesy pattern. He overlaid vocals with the use of the infant talk-bx (then called ‘the bag’) - singing a distorted vocal over the song, making it even more unique than it already had been tied. He debuted his cover of the song on the BBC in early September of 1974, introducing this new sound and technology on the most nonchalant scale he could've. In 1967, Beck remiss about should and shouldn’t be considered art, how noise in any capacity was music and how people try to hard to be different for it to get them nowhere. His writing for this album speaks to this really well, there are times when the songs come across like Beck pushing each of his genres to their brinks, asking what would be considered too much before going further. Constipated Duck into Air Blower into Scatterbrain act as one long epic, one that explores Beck's love of all these different building blocks of the rock scene. He would take the second half of the album to explore a bit more of the current landscape, jam band styling on Freeway Jam, one of his all time best straight forward rock music pieces, and a more progressive, experimental sound on Diamond Dust. Everything somone could want out of guitar music is done here, done perfectly too. There's no misteps, there's nothing that feels out of place even if so much is happening. Beck using Blow by Blow as a vessel for new-found creativity is apparent even without knowing the rebirth he credits for the album.

Cause We Ended As Lovers is the definitive song of the album, if not Beck’s career. It illustrates the beauty of his playing without ever having him feel like he’s going over the top. It’s light, romantic, and it slides between its verses perfectly. The solo towards the middle demonstrates emotions the human voice could never explain. Stevie Wonder had written the song for his then-wife Syreeta’s debut album. Beck had worked with Wonder during the 1972 sessions for Talking Book, where Beck had inspired the beat for Superstition. As reparation for his help in the smash-hit that Superstition became, Wonder offered Beck the song for what would become Blow by Blow. The song excels within its lack of a genuine lyric, even if that’s what Beck’s licks were following. There is no need to look at the words originally written for the melody, Beck conveys everything you’ll ever need to know with nothing but his guitar and the title. It sounds like a noir, like someone is illustrating a meeting between two confidential people as they dictate the end of their love. There’s pleas, heartbreaking emotion, and a fight all conveyed within Beck and a two piece band. It’s a tall order, extracting an undeniably human pain written by one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time and boiling it into a piece devoid of words, explanation, or a human voice. It relies heavily on the talent of Beck in a way that few other pieces do, he wasn’t adding his own, crazy spin on a beloved classic, he was many people's first introduction to the song at all, a song that thrives on an emotional connection. Cause We Ended As Lovers is something that transcends language and instead speaks to thoughts and feelings, you can piece together what his guitar can be saying, but you don’t know. You’re looking in on a couple's private conversation through a hazy, rainy night. You can’t hear them, you can barely see them, but you know the story even if you have to fill in the details. Cause we’ve ended now as lovers doesn’t mean we can’t be each other's friends is your chorus, and you’d know that even without knowing. Jeff Beck never peaked, there was never a definitive era of his career where it can be pointed towards as his most fruitful and expansive nor a song that stands above the rest, but it’s hard to deny that this song stands as one of the most impressive works he’d ever done. It’s more than an impressive player playing a great song, it’s a master of his craft telling a story with the mere movement of his fingers. You could always be great, you could always be talented, but it’s this that showcases no one could ever be Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck performing Cause We Ended as Lovers in 2007

No one had ever been tasked with killing God before Jeff Beck. Beck’s status as 'Eric Clapton’s replacement’ loomed over a sizable chunk of his public image. In the late 1960s

graffiti coated the streets of London,  CLAPTON IS GOD scribed for anyone who cared to read. The reinvention of the electric guitar was said to be in his hands, he was the most famous electric guitarist of his generation: everyone wanted to play like him, and no one dared to disturb the space he occupied. He left the Yardbirds in 1964 as they had begun to move away from their blues roots, finding refuge with the Bluesbreakers before moving to Cream. Beck replaced him, and did not disturb his blues playing or position at the top. Instead he shook up the whole idea of the very position they occupied. Clapton would say of this change in 2012, “It hurt me when Jeff joined the Yardbirds, the band got better without me.” When Beck got his role, he inherited a lifetime of comparison with it. He would never truly vacate the comparison of Clapton, and later Page, despite both guitarists claiming him the best of the three. Beck had very clearly had issues with the workload expected of him and the lack of understanding towards his ideas, wants, and visions. When he was fired from the Yardbirds, it was under those pretenses - he couldn't function in the expected ways and was shunned. Clapton and Page were viewed for their talents and weren't overshadowed by other, more outstanding personal demons that often plagued Beck. This often led to his label being more contested than others - he toured less, released on an offbeat schedule, and didn't have a true claim to fame that the others seemed to find so easily. Blow By Blow  was able to create a space for Beck to prove his formidable worth, something that showcased he was on par with those he was held up with and allowed to function at his own pace without being infiltrated with other drama. It set him down the path of instrumental albums he became revered for, allowing the public to engage with his art on a field that let him shine without putting him in a situation that was bound to unravel quickly.

Everything he did was held to a standard that he never aimed for, it was suddenly more about if he could out-solo someone or how his songs stacked up when compared to the sensibilities of the pop-rock sphere then what he actually wanted to do. Jeff Beck was a guitar god, but he was one that wanted to innovate rather than look for admiration. He wanted to be punk, he wanted to be loud, he wanted to explore jazz - he wanted to be everything but the public forced him into a box. Blow by Blow escaped this rather beautifully, putting Beck in not a category all his own, but a stratosphere all his own. Many reviews at the time hailed Blow by Blow as the return of Jeff Beck, but it's more so an introduction to Jeff Beck than a return. It had felt like all his previous avenues of music had been stepping stones more than bricks to shatter glass houses with. There were only vignettes of what he could do if he was let loose - how he was capable of an songs like

Beck’s Bolero  but was shackled to the idea of a singer, or how Superstition showcased

Full-page ad printed for Blow by Blow in music magazines

the insane reconfiguration of hits he could do but pulled away from that to make half baked, radio-rock songs. It was obvious from his earliest days that Beck stuck out like a sore thumb in terms of guitar gods. Before Blow by Blow there was no Jeff Beck, there were the artist companies that wanted Jeff Beck to be. To return would have meant there was a work to this caliber in his past and that’s just not true. Beck threw everything people knew about him out the window in favor of one of the most eclectic and expansive albums of his day, one reviewer wrote in 1990: "Blow By Blow remains one of the greatest achievements of his or any other guitarists career. It would be ridiculous to single out any individual tracks as better than the others. Especially listening without interruption [..] Blow by Blow is best appreciated as one singular piece of music, just guitar from the word go until the final second. With this album, Beck opened up the doors for this kind of music to be accepted in the mainstream, and this album is probably a perfect as an example of 'jazz for the rock and roll fan' as you can find." 

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In 2024, one of the most contentious, and albeit stupid, conversations about music and genre conspired when Beyoncé released her much anticipated album, Cowboy Carter, the second in a series of “Acts” she is doing in an attempt to return certain genres to their roots in an authentic way. The sentiment she's carried throughout these albums is the idea that genres are often created to box people in, that once the definition is read you find nothing truly fits into one genre or another, that the idea itself boxes artists into a very black and white world when so many things are in greyscale. I could talk about how the blow back of the album, how the accusation she’s “not country enough”, or the idea that modern country music is actually country are all insane statements blanketed in layers of bigotry much too hard to mine here, but it’s important to note how in 2024 those discussions were had, with people unable to recognize or connect with something they couldn’t perfectly box or understand.

When Jeff Beck embarked on the creation of Blow by Blow, fifty years to the day Beyonce would start her album cycle of Cowboy Carter, he was also maligned for straying too far from the binary people expected of him. Purists of both rock and jazz maligned the album, complaining that it wasn’t a pure example of either, and yet the album still sold like crazy, outselling every album he had made to that point. Beck could never be put into a pocket: too experimental for pop, too unfocused for hard rock, too bored with punk, too talented to be a sideman but not willing to put himself in front of a microphone to sing. He was too temperamental, then too loud, then too boring, and now he wasn’t palatable enough to people who never liked his direction anyways. Beck did, in many ways, break down the very staunch barriers up between rock music and other genres. He didn’t commercialize a genre he saw for a means for his own popularity, he went to where he felt his music was leading him, and showed respect to what where he was going and where he had been. Time is a circle, everytime we seem to have resolved an issue we find them brought back at full force.

How is it that an artist can dismantle genre biases so well that they completely reinvent their instrument forever, but this is still something we gawk at with fifty years of proof that it’s an important endeavor?

"Beck was kind of an outsider, and I got a lot of flak from the traditional jazz community where I was being told 'This ain't jazz.' But Jeff broke down those barriers, and now they've disappeared. Today it doesn't matter what kind of music you play; it's how you play it. When the spirit gets you, it doesn't matter where you're coming from - the spirit will be heard. Every musician that I know heard Jeff and loved him, and his spirit will forever.” - John McLaughlin, 2025

Blow by Blow is an accomplisment of musicianship that has never been replicated, even though it carries mountains of influence. It's a piece of work unparalleled in creativity and experimentation, one where you aren’t allowed a moment of silence from start to finish. Beck sits you down and forces you to hear every note he plays for 45 minutes. Never once in that time do you question what you hear, it works in such a way you question how no one had thought to combine all these pieces together, before realizing Jeff Beck is the only person who could ever make a mosaic of this stature. Breaking down doors, finding his own niche for music, and reinventing the guitar hero may have never been on the agenda but they all happened in accordance with Blow by Blow. Smiting God, well, he did that too. But I think God was always waiting for that moment. All is fair in love and jazz.

Jeff Beck peforming Freeway Jam with Jan Hammer at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018: